ABSTRACT
One of the things which motivated me to write Descartes on Seeing1 was a desire get at the source of the idea that in perception we are directly or immediately aware of some sort of inner object that mediates between the knower and the known. I argued there that one of the roots of this view lay in Descartes’ theory of vision – specifically, in his understanding of the role of the retinal image in vision. Yolton is also concerned with this problem, and wishes to show that Descartes (and most of the other major early modern philosophers, with the exception of Malebranche) did not really hold the sort of representative theory of ideas which has often been attributed to them, and thus are not vulnerable to ‘veil of perception’ scepticism. While I am sympathetic to his desire to avoid both veil of perception scepticism and a merely physicalistic account of perception that leaves out the reality of perceptual awareness,2 I am not fully persuaded that the account Yolton develops should be characterised as Descartes’ ‘mature view’.3 And furthermore I have some doubts about how coherent the view is in its own right.
